This Victorian Merkin Merchant is not what he seems! The truth is even more fascinating!

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This Victorian traveling salesman of pubic wigs is not what he seems.

He’s not Victorian. He’s from the 2000s.

And pubic wigs, or merkins, were never sold by itinerant merchants.

This photo, by Stephen Berkman who loves 19th century photography, especially the collodion process, is my jumping-off point to dispel myths about photography.

We tend to believe what we see, even if we are more critical about written words. Why does photography seem so truthful, despite that it can be staged, faked, cherry-picked, manipulated, and taken out of context? AI has made it harder to discern the truth, but we’ve always been gullible when it comes to understanding what we've been shown.

How might we, as part of a community of scholars, look more wisely upon the information that we’re given?

I’ve included an annotated bibliography of places that DO tell the full and real story of this marvellous Merkin Merchant. Don’t settle for imitations!


/// Bibliography

TRUTH: Places where the photo is accurately explained:

The Uncanny Tale of Shimmel Zohar, by Lawrence Weschler, The Atlantic, 2020 https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/a... - THE official story, playfully written, only teasing at the myth through narrator’s suspicions & coincidences

Stephen Berkman, EG8 conference talk, 2014 https://www.egconf.com/videos/stephen... - Berkman describes process and narrates many photos; pre-Zohar’s mythical backstory

Stephen Berkman: Documentary Photographer of the Mind, by Robert Hirsch, Light Research, 2012. https://lightresearch.net/interviews/... Interview pre-Zohar mythology

An Artist of the Yiddish Never-World, by Eddy Portnoy, Tablet Magazine, 2021 https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/ar... Examples of photographic false history with nostalgic truthiness

Predicting the Past: Zohar Studios, The Lost Years, website accompanying exhibition, The Contemporary Jewish Museum, 2020 https://www.thecjm.org/exhibitions/106

‘Zohar Studios’: An Invented Artist’s Lively Inventions, by J. Hoberman, The New York Book Review, 2020. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2020/0...

Step Into a Mysterious Photography Studio From the 1850s, by Sarah Rose Sharp, Hyperallergic, 2020. https://hyperallergic.com/574502/pred... “The collodion almost feels like an ectoplasm, a conduit, for spirits and energy from another time to communicate.”

Stephen Berkman: 19th-Century Renaissance Man, by Bill Smith, Artillery Magazine, 2020 https://artillerymag.com/stephen-berk...

Predicting the Past - Introducing Our Exhibition, Mai Manó Ház. https://www.maimano.hu/programs/predi...
“his characteristic sideburns, which the English call 'Dundreary whiskers,' are even longer and bushier than in the photos on the internet. It occurs to me that this facial hair cannot be a coincidence, since Zohar was almost obsessed with hair, its bizarre manifestations on humans.”

“Make A Merkin Great Again” What is a merkin? Filed under Fake News, Fake Photos, by Lifestyle editor, One Earth Media, 2024 https://1earthmedia.com/make-a-merkin... “...even knowing it’s a hoax, it feels true. The concept of a merkin salesman, absurd as it may sound, fits snugly into the fabric of Victorian eccentricity”

ALSO
Buy the book Predicting the Past—Zohar Studios: The Lost Years, widely described as a gigantic tome. https://hatandbeard.com/products/pred...

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/ma...
Vishniac’s prewar photos as mythical narratives. “...set aside the earthbound conventions of factual detail in service of a more profound takeaway message, one that reached beyond history to elegy.”

The Oxford Companion to the Body on the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/oxfordcom...